Another questionable bit of diet science
Always, always be skeptical of diet / nutrition / risk studies if they violate good common sense.
What were the 'nutrition risk crowd' wrong about in the past?
1. They were wrong about red meat and cancer (if you take out processed meat with a lot of additives, there is no increased risk).
2. They were wrong about dietary cholesterol (not really tied to blood cholesterol or health).
3. They were wrong about fat (turns out the sugar in fat free foods is worse for you, and getting about 35% of your calories from fat can help with weight control and lessen risk of developing diabetes due to sugar/carbohydrate metabolism effects).
4. The nutbar/trendy fringe is wrong about gluten - gluten free foods are useless unless you have a diagnosed medical condition - diagnosed by a real doctor, not a homeopath or naturopath. Worse than useless, they are nutritionally inferior to the versions with natural gluten.
5. They were wrong about salt. That's usually about hypertension, but only some people react to salt that way... and the salt guidelines are set dangerously low (see McMaster University Health Sciences meta-study on salt).
6. They were misleading about the Mediterranean diet - it can help, but only for those in upper economic classes - there is no benefit for those at lower economic levels.
7. Vegan / vegetarian advocates tend to be wrong about a plethora of things. It isn't inherently healthier, though it may help some people do things that they could also do on a normal diet. It isn't for everyone... mutational distributions tend to reflect historic evolution - which is why 98% of North Europeans have adult lactose tolerance genes, compared to 2% of South Asians. People of Northern European ancestry have around a 23% incidence of genes adapting them to surviving on a vegetarian diet. On the other hand, a million continuous years of eating meat has left almost all of us equipped for omnivorous diets - which tend to be far healthier than a vegetarian diet not specifically structured to provide adequate and adequately diverse amino acids and vitamins - see comparisons of health in early farm societies versus hunter-gatherer societies. Historically the farmers tended to win wars, but only because there were ten times as many of them. The Eskimo/Inuit were far healthier when their diet was 98% animal based... their genes are set up for that.
8. 'Organic' food, in general conveys no benefit except consuming money you might spend on something harmful, like cigarettes, alcohol, beach vacations, or motorcycles.
9. GMO food has no problems aside from legal issues around patents. Not only a logical conclusion, but validated by my favourite molecular biologist, who also has a degree in food science. (She also confirms that humans are evolved as omnivorous predators, and anyone who denies that is running from a reality written in our structure and biochemistry.)
I won't even try to address the various quack diets proposed by nutbars and scam artists... there are way too many of them... and I know I am missing cases from the list above.
And, of course, single studies of correlation are close to meaningless...
Useful xkcd reference:
https://www.xkcd.com/882/
If you look, more than half of studies reported in the popular press seem to have apparent problems with confounding factors... and you can only be sort of (but not really) sure they don't by reading the experimental design and analysis.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
